Friday, December 15, 2006

I was heading home from dinner with friends last night when I noticed that someone had emailed me on my cell phone.

"I wonder who it is," I thought as I opened my phone on the train.

Imagine my surprise when I opened my inbox to find an email from "Bono" with the subject "Message from Bono"!The message read:"Hi, this is Bono... Thanks for emailing... We had a great time in Tokyo. We love this city... If you want to join the campaign to make poverty history, please sign up athttp://www.hottokenai.jp/. The more people that join, the more difference we can make in the fight against extreme stupid poverty... Japanese leadership on this issue could change the world. Thanks for reading."

No, Bono and I are not personal friends and no, I didn't email him per se. I got this thanks to the U2 concert I attended last week in Tokyo! I invited the lovely Ms. Tari, who wrote about the concert on her blog here. At one point in the concert, the lights in the arena were turned down and Bono asked everyone to get out their cell phones and open them. He said it looked like a Christmas tree, and it was very cool (made you realize that everyone in Japan has a cell phone!). He then said that at Christmas he wants everyone to remember those in the world who have less than us, and flashed an email address on the screen and asked everyone to email their names to it. Later on in the concert, some of the names emailed were put up on the screen (including Tari's, which was very cool!), and obviously these email addresses are also being used to spread the word about Bono's cause.

Anyway, I got a bit of a thrill out of getting an email from Bono in my inbox. :-)

The concert, by the way, was fabulous!! Unfortunately Bono and the gang are not that tall and the stage was not very high, so it was nearly impossible to see them for most of the concert. This is the best it got (and this is a very bad photo taken with my cell phone...I didn't think they would allow cameras, so I didn't take mine!):

But ever since the concert, I just can't get enough of U2...can't leave the house without my iPod!

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

I wish I could write about what has made my day so terrible, but since the reasons are work-related and I can't know for sure who is reading this, I will spare you all the details. :-) But oh how I wish I could tell...I'm sure it would be a great stress reliever for me.

The day's not over yet, so let's hope it gets better from here on out.

In the meantime, I stumbled across a quote that seemed very appropriate for today:

"Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation." -Oscar Wilde

Monday, December 04, 2006

R and I had a craving for ice cream this weekend, so we went to the convenience store to check out their selection. I think I have found a new obsession...chocolate Yukimi Daifuku!!

Yukimi Daifuku are tantalizing little mounds of ice cream wrapped in omochi (a thin layer of chewy rice cake). Both the omochi and the ice cream in Yukimi Daifuku melt and dribble all over you if you eat them in warm weather, so this product is associated with winter in Japan. The original flavor is vanilla ice cream wrapped in strawberry flavored omochi, but this new flavor incorporates chocolate flavored omochi as well as a fabulously gooey center of pure chocolate. Yum!!! It is very likely I'll be making more trips to the convenience store for these.